Fire (Game & Watch)

Many Game & Watch games feature a regular job turned into a score challenge. On your tiny LCD screen you’ll help a Chef flip food repeatedly or work at a bottling plant as the Mario Bros., but eventually the game comes to an end because it will go on indefinitely until you fail. While this might mean a ruined meal or some brothers possibly losing their job, Fire on Game & Watch feels like the kind of game where you really don’t want to think about what happens after you lose. After all, you’re a set of fireman trying to safely catch people leaping out of a burning building, each miss meaning someone hit the ground instead and the fire not really stopping even after you’ve made three errors and got a Game Over for it. You’re likely not meant to think too deeply about it, even the people who hit the ground looking more like they landed on their butt rather than receiving grievous injuries, but it is a bit of a shame your endless rescue work can’t technically have a happy ending.

Before we begin looking at the game systems in Fire, it should be noted which version will be covered here. Fire was one of the first Game & Watch handhelds released but it’s seen a few different versions. The original release was part of the Silver series that kicked off the line of handhelds, it even getting renamed to Fireman Fireman in the U.S. when MEGO released it instead as part of the Time Out handheld series. However, when Nintendo themselves reflect on Fire in later games, they often instead reference the Widescreen edition released a year after these two versions, one that included new elements and readjusted the scoring system. Over in the Silver series version, you only can score points once a person who leaps from the burning building has safely made it to the ambulance by way of bouncing off the trampoline your two firemen carry, but the Widescreen version (the one played for this review) will grant a point for each bounce on the trampoline regardless of the eventual fate of the people you’re rescuing. You could say that points are thus hard-earned in the original release but it also makes trying to beat your score feel like a slower process, and perhaps more importantly, this doesn’t really impact the game much since the only way to keep playing Fire is to keep bouncing people along, meaning you’ll never be making a decision that could lead to earning points differently across the two versions.

Your main concern in Fire will be bouncing those people jumping from their balconies safely to the parked ambulance on the far right, the player using the system’s Left and Right buttons to move the firemen to one of three available standing positions. The jumpers will bounce on your trampoline so long as it is positioned in the right spot at the right time, the challenge eventually being that multiple people will leap down in short succession and at faster rates so you need make sure you’re in the right area as you bounce them along to the rescue vehicle. There is one element that makes this a bit easier than it sounds, since the bounce paths of the falling people are always going to be the same. The arc of a bouncing man after they hit the trampoline is always four positions high, the second bounce sends them up three, and the last bounce will launch them up two, although you don’t need to worry about that since at that point their landing spot is the ambulance. You can get a decent feel for this consistency even if you don’t take the time to note the bounce distance, but luckily Fire doesn’t become too automatic even once you understand this feature.

One reason Fire doesn’t lose its difficulty too much after you understand the arcs is the way the bouncing people look as they come falling down. The people can fly and fall fairly quickly as they bounce around, meaning in the heat of the moment it can look like two people are fairly close to the point of no return. Fire remains fair throughout though, you can always technically be where it’s needed and potentially earn a huge high score, but you need to have a good eye for which person is technically in danger first if you want to keep the play going. This can even be true in Game A once it has picked up speed, the usual Game & Watch trend of Game A being easy mode not necessarily meaning it’s a walk in the park. In fact, there is a more interesting form of differentiation between Game A and Game B here than just upping the amount of jumpers active at once.

While most things in Fire move in a reliable manner, Game B seeks to throw a spanner in the works. Technically you never know when someone might make the jump off the fourth floor’s balcony, but the fall from so high at least gives you a decent amount of time to spot them. However, Game B introduces people stuck on lower stories who are now jumping from the third floor balcony. While this sounds like a small change, when they jump off, there are actually only two positions they’ll hit in midair before landing hard on the ground, the player needing to be much quicker to respond to these jumpers lest the game catches them by surprise with a sudden Miss. There are chances to clear away your Misses though, when you reach 200 points or 500 points all Misses are erased so you can keep playing longer. Reaching those points can be particularly difficult once things start speeding up, but that also makes Fire a game you won’t be too quick to master despite its design staying mostly rigid throughout.

THE VERDICT: Fire on Game & Watch doesn’t lose its difficulty once you get a good feel for how high people will bounce on your trampoline, but even with the extra balcony for people to jump from in Game B, Fire doesn’t feel like it’s as addictive as it could have been. While things get speedier and more people end up in the air at once, it feels a bit like failure will come more from a missed call on who is closer to the ground rather than a failure to juggle an increasingly energetic task. That does mean the game hits a decent difficulty level and you feel like you can do better in you next shot at setting a high score, but the losses do feel more annoying because they’re likely to be a slip-up rather than the result of shifting variables.

And so, I give Fire for Game & Watch…

An OKAY rating. Looking back at Chef’s successes can help show why Fire nearly works as well as it does and yet doesn’t quite get there. Chef only asks you to move back and forth in the same way Fire does, both being about keeping objects in the air, but Fire is too consistent about it. The reliable arcs the bouncing people travel is why a loss feels more like a slip-up since you reach a point where you feel your judgment should be sound. Chef has all three or four meats fly at different heights, meaning you’re constantly thinking about each item, but Fire you know those people will be on a consistent path so there are times where play can become more automatic. Fire thankfully doesn’t need Game B’s occasional disruption of a jumper on the lower level to be difficult though, mostly because Fire has a good sense for how much it can speed up without making things unfair. Game & Watch games generally like designs that are always technically possible to continue on infinitely so long as you identify the right spot to be, but Fire likes to start pushing the limits of your attention as the gap between these shortens as more people move more quickly. It does feel like Fire would have still benefited from less consistent bounce arcs though, something like giving a smaller arc to people who jump from lower balconies would make things tougher in a good way since you’d need to think more about who’s up in the air. The different fall speeds could make it almost too difficult to maintain though, so possibly something closer to Chef’s interfering cat could help, like possibly a passing bird that might snatch a person midair and then release them after a bit.

Fire still works as one of the simpler Game & Watch offerings still worth checking out. It’s not rife for exploitation nor are its moving parts so consistent that you can almost play it automatically, the speed shifts already good at invigorating things even after you figure out the exact movement paths of the falling people. Essentially, its mild success just emerges from an understanding that juggling does become difficult to maintain once you have many pieces active at once. While that “juggling” takes the form of a life saving rescue here, it still gives that sense of satisfaction in being able to maintain something that remains difficult even once you understand the moving parts well, so while Chef may be more exciting, Fire at least can be a nice challenging break from a more dynamic Game & Watch title.